‘Refuse to acknowledge everything’

If De Void were still blogging about UFOs, De Void would’ve gone straight through the roof on Wednesday. That’s when author/reporter Ted Gup’s New York Times op-ed piece on the CIA’s double standard revealed his own glaring bias re The Great Taboo.

Gup, who in 1992 described the top-secret subterranean nuclear blast-proof bunker for Cold War-era government officials in Greenbrier County, W.Va., was properly lamenting the erratic nature of what the CIA regards as national security. The hook was the upcoming sentencing of John Kiriakou, the first CIA officer convicted of leaking a colleague’s name to the press. It’s a complicated story, but aren’t they all? Gup blasted The Agency’s “arbitrary and selective application of secrecy” by rattling off the names of employees who parlayed their own service to secrecy into book deals: George Tenet, Milton Bearden, Bob Baer, Tony Mendez, Linday Moran, Melissa Boyle Mahle and Floyd Paseman.

Chase Brandon, a retired 35-year CIA veteran, has yet to amend his contention last summer that The Agency held information proving the Roswell Incident involved “a craft that clearly did not come from this planet"/CREDIT: theufochronicles.com

“There was a time at the C.I.A.,” Gup continued, “not so long ago, when the notion of cashing in on one’s access to secrets was considered contemptible. How, then, does one explain how Chase Brandon, a former C.I.A. covert operative, become the agency’s liaison with Hollywood (‘Mission Impossible II’?) And what of the International Spy Museum, a for-profit entity in Washington headed by a former C.I.A. officer Peter Earnest? (The museum gift shop’s most popular T-shirt says ‘Deny Everything.’)”

“I absolutely know … that there was a craft from beyond this world that crashed at Roswell,” Brandon told radio host George Noory, “that the military picked up remains of not just the wreckage but cadavers and all of that was made public for a short while … One hundred percent guarantee, in my heart and soul I say — Roswell happened.”

Excuse me, Mr. Gup. Do you not find this the least bit interesting? Maybe just a little bit? How about the fact that, in response, The Agency essentially called the man it trusted for 10 years to protect and enhance its image, in Hollywood, a liar? That doesn’t grab you? Critics charged Brandon made the allegations in order to promote his sci-fi novel; if they’re right, isn’t this a better and even more perverse example of commercial exploitation than critiquing scripts?

Oh. Wait. If you used UFOs to clobber Brandon, you’d actually have to make a few phone calls to some of the “well over 100 case officers” or the “five former directors” you cited in your article as sources over the years. Because naturally, you’d want to make sure you were on firm ground with the fraud thing. And that’s right — the Times doesn’t do UFOs. Sorry. Nevermind.